Software application programs commonly referred to as personal information managers, or PIMs, have become extremely popular as a tool for organizing, tracking and managing personal information. One aspect of a PIM is a calendar application program which provides a user interface including a graphical representation of a calendar. The user may select to display a day, week, month, etc. Using the calendar interface, a user may record appointments, events and other information. Calendar application programs also provide automatic notifications and reminders about upcoming appointments and events. Calendar application programs typically communicate and exchange information with other PIM application programs, such as for example email and contact application programs, as well as other datastores.
Events typically are displayed on conventional calendar interfaces at their appointed date as typewritten words, and may possibly be displayed within a graphical box having a background which may be the same or different than the background of the calendar interface. One shortcoming to conventional calendar applications is that they provide little or no ability for a user to differentiate saved events with respect to the relative importance of the events. For example, a parent's birthday may be a more important event than a scheduled visit from a television repairman. However, a saved event relating to the television repairman visit is not differentiated from the saved event relating to the parent's birthday with respect to the importance of those events. Both of those events are displayed on the calendar interface in the same way.
Moreover, while conventional calendar application programs provide pop-up reminders or the like a few days in advance, these reminders are not optimized for planning around special occasions, such as family and friend birthdays. It would be advantageous to provide an interface in which special occasions occurring for example a month, a few months or even a year away are clearly shown to allow the user ample time to plan and prepare for the occasion.